Praise for Logicomix

“It’s difficult not to be dazzled by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou’s Logicomix. It’s a biography of the mathematician/philosopher Bertrand Russell, a fiercely engaging examination of his elusive attempt to isolate the logical foundations of mathematics, and a rousing historical yarn. And all of Logicomix’s storytelling and intellectual pyrotechnics are delineated in extraordinarily crisp, cleverly designed and beautifully colored artwork by the team of Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna. What a comic book! Easily one of the most impressive combinations of popular art and serious history that I’ve encountered in prose or in comics.”

“This is an extraordinary graphic novel, wildly ambitious in daring to put into words and drawings the life and thought of one of the great philosophers of the last century, Bertrand Russell. Interwoven with breathtaking excursions into logic and mathematics, in language we can all understand, is the trajectory of Russell’s personal life — his parents and grandparents, his wives, his inner conflicts. The book is a rare intellectual and artistic achievement which will, I am sure, lead its readers to explore realms of knowledge they thought were forbidden to them.”

– HOWARD ZINN, historian and author of A People’s History of the United States

“This magnificent book is about ideas, passions, madness, and the fierce struggle between well-defined principle and the larger good. It follows the great mathematicians–Russell, Whitehead, Frege, Cantor, Hilbert–as they agonized to make the foundations of mathematics exact, consistent, and complete. We see how Gödel illuminates their project. We see the Erinyes of Aeschylus’s Oresteia giving up their principle of merciless revenge in favor of considered justice. And we see the band of artists and researchers–and the all-seeking dog Manga–creating, and participating in, this glorious narrative.”

-BARRY MAZUR, Gerhard Gade University Professor at Harvard University and author of Imagining Numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen).

“The lives of ideas (and those who think them) can be as dramatic and unpredictable as any superhero fantasy. What could be more natural than a graphic novel to show how intellectual adventure plays out in the world of experience, with all its contradictions? Logicomix is witty, engaging, stylish, visually stunning, and full of surprising sound effects, a masterpiece in a genre for which there is as yet no name.”

– MICHAEL HARRIS, professor of Mathematics at Université Paris 7 and member of the Institut Universitaire de France.